The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March 2015

LONDON, AUGUST 1st 2015, the Afrikan Heritage Community (AHC) will be marching from Brixton Windrush Square at 11am to Parliament. We are choosing to march, in the belly of the beast, to show the World, that we as a People stand united and determined in the sacred cause of effecting and securing reparatory justice (reparations).

THEME: EDUCATION IS PART OF THE PREPARATION FOR REPARATIONS

We march with the following aims and intent:

To draw attention to Afrikan peoples’ global determination to not let the British State and other perpetrators get away with the crimes of the Maangamizi (Afrikan hellacaust and continuum of chattel, colonial and neo-colonial enslavement);

To hand in the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide petition requesting an All-Party Commission of Inquiry for Truth & Reparatory Justice in order to raise consciousness about the fact that all the attacks on us, in both individual and collective instances, amount to Genocide/Ecocide in Maangamizi continuity, necessitating reparations;

To increase awareness of the necessity to ‘Stop the Maangamizi’ and its current manifestations such as austerity, attempts to recolonise Afrika, immigration, mentacide and deaths in police, psychiatric and prison custody;

To demonstrate Afrikan peoples’ strength, capacity and determination to speak truth to, and challenge establishment power with our growing grassroots power to effect and secure reparatory justice on our own terms;

To highlight Afrikan people’s grassroots demands and initiatives for effecting and securing reparations.

After a resoundingly successful Reparations March on the 1st of August 2014 in London, England, the AHC forming part of the Global Afrikan Nation-in-Formation has seen fit to have a globally co-ordinated march this year. Indeed history is being made because it is the first time that Afrikan people are unifying the struggle for reparations with Afrikan reparations constituencies and our Communities of Resistance in Afrika and throughout the Diaspora. There will be simultaneous marches and other mobilisations in 9 Afrikan countries, North America, the Caribbean and Europe. The 1st of August has been chosen as the day of the march because it is the officially recognised “Emancipation Day”, marking the passing of the Abolition of Slavery Act in the British Empire, on 1 August 1833.

However, the passing of this act however did very little to truly emancipate enslaved Afrikan people and contributed to their unjust impoverishment, dispossession and social displacement which is still impacting on people and communities of Afrikan heritage today. Indeed, the recent findings of a six-year project by University College London and the recently aired two-part BBC2 documentary, ‘Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners’, presented by historian and filmmaker David Olusoga broadcast on July,15th and 22nd respectively, reveal that thousands of modern-day Britons, including Prime Minister David Cameron, are related to enslavers who were unjustly enriched with huge sums of compensation when the enslavement of Afrikans was formally abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833. We know that the 800,000 enslaved people in the Caribbean were deemed to be worth, as chattel property, £47 million by the British Parliament who legislated that these enslavers would receive £20 million compensation for loss of their so called human chattel and total control over the lives of our Afrikan fore parents. This was the equivalent of 40 per cent of all annual government spending at the time. What it has also hidden from the world is that the same parliament also determined that the remaining £27 million would be paid by the enslaved people to their enslavers, by means of a 4 year period of free labour called the Apprenticeship.

The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March, forming a joint project with its companion project Stop: The Maangamizi We Charge Genocide Ecocide Petition and Campaign is a positive action step of Afrikan reparatory justice campaigning, highlighting the need to Stop the Maangamizi before we can truly repair the harm. https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-maangamizi-we-charge-genocide-ecocide. The Petition calls for the British Government, Parliament and other interested state and non-state bodies to establish an All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth & Reparatory Justice. It is also galvanising grassroots work towards establishing local sittings of the Peoples International Tribunal for Global Justice (PITGJ) as part of a series of actions which will put a full stop, by way of holistic and transformative reparations, to all acts of Genocide/Ecocide against Afrikan people. Since reparations is one of the most misunderstood concepts, with mainstream media outlets often misrepresenting the goals of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR) ‘from below,’ we have chosen the theme for the 2015 march and ensuing year long-programme of mobilisation ‘Education is Part of the Preparation for Reparations’. Raising political and legal consciousness and awareness of the just entitlements and rights to reparations and other forms of redress is an essential step in the process of taking decisive action to bring about transformative social change. For further info contact 07804282509/07915446009/Facebook: TheMarchAugust.

1 Response to The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March 2015

I still cannot believe that that those persons who were marching in Britain for reparations could be so hypocritical! I still don’t understand it, why is it that these people take such great pride in biting the hand that is feeding them?

Look at what some of their banners shouted: “We don’t want to be subjects without rights” “Repatriation and Reparations now” “Cameron: blood deh pon your shoulders” “Britain, you did profit from the trans-Atlantic slave trade”. Headlines like these were everywhere.

Are these people really serious?

Many of these same people abandoned their own black homelands in the Caribbean and Africa or are children of those who did and went to Britain for a better life. Indeed, many of them gave up everything they had in their original homes and fought real hard to get to what they saw as the British paradise.

As such, the banner preaching “we don’t want to be subjects without rights” seemed very odd. Were these marchers saying that they fled to a country where they have no rights? Also, if this is true, why don’t they leave? Indeed, come to think of it, why do these marchers remain in Britain if it is such a terrible place or if it really did such terrible things to them and their ancestors? Why the hypocrisy?

Then there is another thing. As these marchers felt so strongly that Britain was built by the slave trade, why are they condemning Britain’s so-called crime and yet condoning it by living in that same country, using its slave-gotten wealth to better themselves, abiding by its “Babylonian laws” and indeed, strengthening that same country by working for it?

As for those banners demanding repatriation, I am sure most Britons had a good laugh. Some of those marchers demanding repatriations left Africa and the Caribbean and went to Britain. Most Britons must be laughing at their poor sense of direction!

Why do they continue, for instance, to demand justice for their ancestors and at the same time cry out whenever Britain tries to limit the number of them who try to get into the country – legally and illegally? Why is it that if Britain should ever give these same marchers a choice between leaving the “slavery-built” country and death, they would choose death?

It really is sad that after opening up itself to help these people by giving them an opportunity for a better life, Britain had to face the hypocrisy of these same ungrateful immigrants!

If these people were really sincere in their convictions about reparations and repatriations they wouldn’t be living in Britain – the so-called center of slavery and black oppression. They would have done all they could to avoid the country. Alas, their hypocrisy got the better of them. What a comical bunch of double-talkers!